We got our hands on Angel At The Fence, Herman Rosenblat's fabricated book about a little girl who threw apples over a concentration camp fence. It's as hesitant as you might expect.

Or at least it is in describing the author's first supposed meetings with his wife, at the fence. Like fellow faker Margaret Seltzer, Rosenblat seemed eager to move the narrative from specific events calling for convincing detail to broader, more abstract musings. So while the author supposes "no meal before or since has ever tasted as good" as the first apple thrown over the camp fence, he is very confident that "brutality banalizes not just those who do it but those to whom it is done," i.e. both concentration camp inmates and guards.

Before she was exposed as a well-off suburban girl rather than a hardscrabble gangster, lying…
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The little girl's clothing is described in very broad terms, a "red sweater over a blue skirt... very striking." And yet Rosenblat remembers the girl stared "artlessly and candidly," as though children gazing across a concentration camp fence should act more sophisticated, and as though he thought so even at the time.

There's plenty more to guffaw at in the excerpts below.

It all started with a contest in the Post...

Here's the first meeting at the fence:

And a tearful, almost romantic, parting of ways:

Rosenblat and the little girl, now grown up, meet again in 1957 at Coney Island and realize their connection:

In the epilogue that immediately follows, Rosenblat describes how he and his wife were often hard up for money. His memoir would have offered the real-life Holocaust survivor a path to a cushier retirement.